Geocoding is a process for translating common street address information such as “200 North 1st Avenue, Phoenix, Ariz.” or “Main St and 31st AVE, Tempe, Ariz.” into geographical coordinates, i.e., latitude and longitude coordinates. The process normally involves searching and correlating street and/or address information input by a user with reference map data. However, users may enter the same street/address information in many different formats, none of which may be recognized by or correspond to the reference map data. For example, “Highway 87” in Arizona can be entered as “State Road 87”, “Arizona State Highway 87”, “SR 87”, or by using some other variant, whereas the reference map may reference the road or street as only as “AZ-87”. Furthermore, different reference maps may format the same data differently, for example, “AZ-87” could also be known as “HWY 87”. In addition, street address location identifier formats vary from country to country. In the United States of America, for example, the street number is in front of the street name, but in France and other countries this ordering is reversed. The use of different street/address information formats results in inconsistent and/or unsuccessful geocoding results.
Existing geocoding processes adopt one of several tactics in the absence of an exact match between user input address/street information and reference map data. It is known, for example, to attempt to match abbreviations of words such as “Street” and “St”, “Boulevard” and “BLVD”, “Highway” and “HWY”, etc. It is also known to use Soundex or other string-pattern matching techniques to resolve street/address information to an approximate match, sometimes providing a confidence level based on the “proximity” thereof. These tactics may address some issues such as typographical errors and the use of abbreviations. However, the tactics are not sufficiently intelligent to address the fundamental issues of mismatch between the user input address format and the reference map data format. For example, the above techniques can hardly resolve “Arizona State highway 87” to “AZ-87”, or “1289 LOOP 410 SW” to “1289 SW I-410-LOOP”.
The various aspects, features and advantages of the disclosure will become more fully apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon careful consideration of the following Detailed Description thereof with the accompanying drawings described below.